SAN FRANCISCO - CONNECTIONS 2006 - June 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that it is becoming the BI solution of choice for leading Software as a Service (SaaS) application providers and their customers. Today, more than 200 companies and 20,000 end users worldwide access strategic information stored in hosted applications with Cognos technology, gaining the power of the industry's most complete BI capabilities without having to manage the application data in house.
"SaaS will be a pervasive application business model over the next four years, and Cognos is already at the forefront of this evolution through its strong relationships and partner deployments," said Jennifer Francis, vice president of market development, Cognos. "Cognos 8 BI's innovative architecture, Web-based interface, security, and scalability have made it the perfect BI product for SaaS providers. It provides enterprise-class BI capabilities to organizations through a low-risk, low-cost hosted environment, and demonstrates once again, Cognos' technology leadership and its strategic role in helping companies gain better visibility and insight into organizational performance."
"As companies seek opportunities for lower TCO, faster time to value, and lower risk for IT solutions, they are turning to SaaS vendors for select hosted applications such as sales force automation, CRM, and compliance," said Benjamin Pring, research vice president, Gartner. "In fact, software as a service is a key growth area within the overall software sector and will represent a third of all new software within five years."
By adding Cognos technology in these environments, customers can maintain the same SaaS benefits they are getting from their application vendors, while realizing the enhanced decision making capabilities of enterprise class BI available through reports, dashboards, scorecards, analyses, and events. Cognos BI technology is entirely Web-based, and its services-oriented architecture easily scales and integrates into existing infrastructures with multiple systems and data sources. Furthermore, Cognos 8 BI's data, security, and business models allow SaaS application vendors to deploy in a multi-tenant architecture to optimize their business, while their customers enjoy secure, flexible, and customizable BI. Other products use thick-client environments that are not suited for a SaaS and are only partially deployable in the SaaS model. Cognos delivers a robust technology foundation for BI standardization and performance management, and is the ideal complement to existing hosted software solutions.
Several global SaaS providers have augmented their hosted applications with Cognos' BI capabilities, including Concur Technologies, Inc., DataStream (now Infor), Information Technology, Inc., and Solucient.
Infor provides Asset Performance Management (APM) software and services to enterprises worldwide, including more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500, and is recognized by Gartner as the leading provider of hosted EAM/APM solutions. Infor's flagship product, Datastream 7i, delivers a complete APM infrastructure by combining an Internet, Web services architecture with broad enterprise asset management functionality, integrated procurement, advanced analytics and multi-site capability. Datastream 7i leverages Cognos reporting and analytics capabilities to provide users with even greater flexibility to create complex reports with drag-and-drop simplicity.
"Cognos technologies provide an ideal complement to Infor's Datastream 7i solution, helping customers to maintain and manage capital assets, and create analyses and forecasts so they can take action to improve future performance," said Jim Plourde, vice president of Hosted Solutions, Infor. "The Web-based architecture of Cognos maps well to Infor's offerings, and its scalability meets the enterprise-class needs our customers have come to expect of our hosted solutions."
Solucient, a leading source of healthcare BI in the US, serves more than 2,900 customers by providing tools and vital insights that healthcare managers use to improve the performance of their organizations. The company maintains the nation's largest healthcare database, comprised of more than 26 million discharges per year from 2,900 hospitals, representing 77.5 percent of all discharges. Solucient uses Cognos reporting technologies as the BI platform and information delivery tool to deliver hosted analytics and dashboard reports to more than 2,000 hospitals, as well as eight of the 10 largest pharmaceutical manufacturers in the United States.
"Solucient's expertise and proven solutions enable providers and pharmaceutical companies to achieve results and realize value," said Matthew Bates, senior vice president of products and technology, Solucient. "Cognos' open data strategy and flexible reporting capabilities make it easy for us to deliver results-oriented information to help our customers drive business growth, manage costs, and deliver quality care."
In addition, Information Technology, Inc. (ITI) delivers Cognos reporting technologies as a solution in Premier(R) Viewpoint, its Web-based BI application for financial institutions. With Premier Viewpoint, ITI's customers, both novices and experts alike, can more easily author, manage, and view reports from a single portal, and receive concise and easy-to-understand access to the valuable data that institutions rely on to make decisions and formulate policy. ITI is in the early stages of deploying Premier Viewpoint and the Cognos reporting technology within data center environments, where these solutions can be hosted for financial institutions that outsource account processing.
"The ability to share meaningful business intelligence throughout the organization is critical for management in the fast-paced world of finance," said Dan Werner, General Manager of ITI's Decision Metrics operating unit. "The Web-based nature of the Cognos technology makes it ideal for both direct and hosted implementations. Delivering Cognos technology as a hosted service through data centers will give customers immediate visibility into every aspect of business data while eliminating the expense and hassle of configuring, hosting, and maintaining the solution themselves."
About Cognos:
Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.
Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organization's ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions - - How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? -- and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies.
Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos performance management solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com/.
Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
Media Contacts:
Amy Shanler
Cognos, Inc., 781-313-2464
© 2006 PR Newswire
